Opinion Tavleen Singh writes: Time to forget about temples and statues… concentrate on building cities
Time to forget about building temples and giant statues of dead leaders, and concentrate on building cities that don’t look like slums.
There are solutions, dear readers and fellow citizens. But these solutions require drastic changes in municipal governance. This column comes to you a long way away from our beloved Bharat Mata. The first thing I noticed when I arrived in this small town in upstate New York was how clean the air was. Any Indian traveller who came here from northern India or even Mumbai would probably notice this first because it is such a dramatic change from the poisonous air we breathe in our own wondrous land. It cheered me up when I read the Indian newspapers on this cold and frosty morning that air pollution is becoming a political issue. Important political leaders, judges and doctors have started speaking of it in angry voices. As they should have done long, long ago. May their voices get angrier and louder.
The truth is that this is a major crisis that can no longer be left to provincial officials to deal with. It is a national emergency. And it is time the Prime Minister personally intervened because if something so vital as clean air is unavailable, he can quite simply forget about his grandiose dream of India becoming a fully developed country in 20 years. There are other things I notice as I sit in a gloomy mood and write this piece. The roads that I drove along to get here did not have litter lining them. The woods were beautiful, the streams pristine and the villages charming. Why does our own beloved motherland look so bad, I asked myself sadly.
The question barely came to my mind and I knew the answer. It is because our political leaders spend most of their time on things that matter to them and not to the people. They concentrate on winning elections and when the elections are over, they concentrate on squabbling over who gets the best jobs in government. They fight over who should be chief minister not because of their desire to do something wonderful for the state but so that they can strut around like petty potentates. It has always been this way. What has changed since Narendra Modi became Prime Minister is that displays of public religiosity have reached new heights.
Personally, I have no problem with new temples being built but can we also build cities and towns that are livable? One of the great marvels of ancient India were its cities. If in ancient times it was possible to build cities that were not just beautiful but equipped with urban necessities like clean water and waste disposal, why is it so hard for us to build them now? Once more I shall answer my own question. The men and women responsible for municipal governance are usually more interested in lining their pockets than in providing the services essential for making cities livable. This happens because they can get away with taking bribes to allow unplanned, ugly urban sprawls to pass off as cities. When was the last time you heard of a municipal official being jailed for allowing unplanned buildings to rise out of squalid slums?
There are solutions, dear readers and fellow citizens. But these solutions require drastic changes in municipal governance. Instead of chief ministers overseeing municipal services, they should be in the hands of elected mayors who can be held accountable. All that our chief ministers appear to do is find the biggest houses in the most expensive localities of our capital cities and cause traffic jams because of the cavalcades they travel in on the specious grounds that this is necessary for their security. All these things must be ruthlessly stopped.
Will this happen since it has not for decades? It will happen only when the Prime Minister’s office takes personal charge as happened with the Swachh Bharat campaign. Urban decay is so serious that it should be declared a national emergency and immediate measures taken not just to clean up the air in our cities but to find ways to manage waste and create parks and gardens that can act as the lungs that are such a vital component of planned urbanisation.
There are other things that must be priorities. At the top of my list is affordable housing. Millions of citizens come to our cities from distant rural villages and live in appalling conditions. A ‘room’ in central Mumbai costs more than Rs 30,000 a month, which is more than the migrants who come earn as salaries. So, they sleep in shifts in tiny hovels and eke out an existence, and the sad thing is that living on the footpaths of Mumbai or Delhi is better than life in the villages. These words were barely written when I spotted a post on ‘X’ from the Prime Minister. He said, ‘The 8.2% growth in quarter 2 of 2025-26 is very encouraging. It reflects the impact of our pro-growth policies and reforms…our government will continue to advance reforms and strengthen Ease of Living for every citizen.’
Ease of Living, Prime Minister? Seriously? If you could on your regular visits to foreign lands spend some time as an ordinary citizen and look at our country from a distance you might notice that our beloved Bharat Mata looks like a place where most citizens cannot even dream of such a luxury as ‘ease of living’. Time to forget about building temples and giant statues of dead leaders, and concentrate on building cities that look like modern cities and not slums.
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